Olive One home music player sounds like a hit

Olive Media is known for its high-end music servers, ranging in price from $1499 to $4999. With the just-announced Olive One the company is trying some different things: Both a price intended for the masses (starting at $399) and crowdfunding the project through Indiegogo.

The Olive One is designed as a way to access all your music via a 7-inch touch-screen interface. You can stream music to it via Bluetooth 4.0, dual-band Wi-Fi 802.11n and Wi-Fi Direct, or from a UPnP or DNLA server; or play your music directly from an optional built-in hard drive. It also supports Pandora, Spotify, YouTube, and other streaming services, as well as cloud services. Free Android and iOS apps will you let control it remotely, and with Miracast you can access the UI and music on your TV.

It will include a 32-bit/384kHz Burr-Brown digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and dual amplifiers for connecting to speakers, as well as a 24-bit DSP that dynamically adapts the sound to your brand and model of speakers.

As part of the crowdfunding aspect, contributors will also have the opportunity to provide feedback on features and design. If Olive reaches its extended funding goal of $1 million, the company will offer customization capabilities (other benefits are promised at lower funding levels as well).

The company hopes to ship the Olive One in July 2013 for $399, or $499 for the model with a built-in 1TB hard drive or $599 for 2TB.

Confidence level

Olive has plenty of experience making high-quality music players for audiophiles, and says the player has been in development for more than a year (and has a pre-production prototype completed to show for it). The $200,000 base funding goal seems attainable based on early contributions and the amount of time left, so I expect we’ll see the product in some form or another. (Extended goals starting at $500,000 for three extra software developers may be more wishful thinking, however.)